Seattle is sometimes pointed to as a “climate sanctuary”. A couple of weeks ago it was 108° here in Seattle. Let me repeat that: a hundred and eight degrees. In Seattle.
Our reaction as a city: air conditioning installation is booked out for months.
To be fair, Seattle's electric grid has been on all sustainable energy for a while now. Seattle is one of the greenest city in the U.S. On top of that, any person living in King County is able to pay a little bit extra to opt into 100% sustainable energy.
The reaction from Seattle isn't terribly illogical.
EDIT: Should mention the city is NOT carbon neutral by any means. We still have buses running on gas.
True, we are fortunate we can avoid hard choices on power source up here (lots of hydro). But what I meant to highlight was that our focus tends to be on solving our local short-term climate problems, just like everybody else.
FWIW, most of the weather modeling people (e.g. Cliff Mass) are asserting that the PNW heat wave was more of a Black Swan event caused by a near perfect storm of ordinary weather factors that had little to do with climate change. The contribution of climate change to this specific event was marginal at best, this type of heat wave has always been possible in principle.
Listen to yourself. Black swan event, possible in principle, near perfect storm of ordinary weather factors…
Read up on what chaos theory and chaotic behavior of systems is. Investigate the principle of 'period three implies chaos' and observe what happens when you have stably chaotic behaviors, with known excursions, and then you slightly increase the energy in the system.
What WE are saying (which in no way contradicts what Cliff Mass is also saying) is that the increase of energy, even by seemingly little amounts, radically increases the possible range of outcomes… and the 'black swan' events become commonplace, and then you get NEW 'black swan' events that are truly the exception rather than the new norm.
And that is what we are concerned about, and why 'A 3°C world has no safe place'. Cliff is not necessarily wrong that black swan events happen. He may be fatally wrong about recent behavior constituting a 'black swan'. This is more like the new normal: not sustained heat domes in a predictable way, but this type of event.
You'll know the real black swan when it comes, because it will be demonstrating the impossible and unsurvivable. We just don't know the exact form of it, or where it'll be, but there will be no mistaking it. I don't believe the heat dome was the real black swan.
Our reaction as a city: air conditioning installation is booked out for months.